For many New Orleanians, the years of struggle after Hurricane Katrina -- punctuated by the lack of basic services, penny-pinching insurance companies and hard-to-navigate government aid programs -- were almost more painful than the shock of seeing an entire American city under water.

View full sizeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-Picayune archiveSid Patrick, owner of Captain Sid's Seafood in Bucktown, was photographed boiling crawfish in February. After the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, 'I don't know if I'm gonna last to see this business get back on its feet,' he said.

But the New Orleans Saints' first-ever Super Bowl victory seemed like a bookend, signaling to the country that the New Orleans area was fully on the mend and, in some ways, better than ever.

Then, suddenly, the city's glow was replaced by round-the-clock news reports of viscous oil coursing out of subsea pipes, brown pelicans gasping for breath under thick coats of crude and a federal drilling moratorium exposing the economic fragility of southeast Louisiana.

Now, 122 days after the Deepwater Horizon rig sank and BP's oil well began spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico, those who were socked by both disasters are scrambling to make sense of their latest losses, while waiting, yet again, for the disaster's architect and the government to help them reconstitute their former lives.

"We had come back from the storm and business was really picking up; everything was getting back together," said Sid Patrick, owner of Captain Sid's Seafood in Bucktown. "I thought I was all right till the oil spill came and took everything away from us."

For months after Katrina flooded his home and submerged most of the region, Patrick, 75, slept on the floor of his seafood market. He fought for years with the Road Home, and still collected about $50,000 less than he needed for repairs.

Despite it all, Patrick had Captain Sid's, which he reopened in a matter of weeks after the storm.

Then came the April 20 rig explosion, which killed 11 workers and sent nearly 5 million barrels of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. The seafood industry was brought to its knees, and so was Patrick's business.

"I'm no spring chicken, so I don't know if I'm gonna last to see this business get back on its feet," he said.

That feeling of hopelessness goes beyond those with direct ties to coastal commerce. In a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, taken while the oil was still gushing unchecked, half of New Orleans residents said the economic damage from the oil spill would surpass what Katrina wrought.

View full sizeMichael DeMocker, The Times-PicayuneLarry Carbo, a counselor with Catholic Charities, worked with firefighters and first responders after Katrina and is now counseling people dealing with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Larry Carbo, a volunteer counselor serving devastated fishers and their families, said the fishers remind him of the first responders he tried to help after Katrina. He sees anger and uncertainty, wives yelling at their suddenly homebound husbands, and a sharp rise in drinking and domestic violence. Even for those, like himself, who lost no property or work from the spill, the feelings of loss can be significant.

"My wife and I go out to dinner the other day and normally I get this shrimp and pasta dish," Carbo said. "The lady said, 'We don't have any shrimp because of oil spill.' That really got to me. And if that gets to me, maybe this is bigger than we thought it was. The average Joe Blow, what do you think he's thinking about?"

Dr. Elmore Rigamer, a psychiatrist who has led Catholic Charities' counseling efforts after both catastrophes, said a lot of the reaction to the spill can be chalked up to the way anger works.

"Katrina came and it went, so how long can you be angry with God?" he said. "Your anger with Katrina was more about the government's bumbling impeding your progress to recovery, and it stretched out over years. This one, it's entirely man-made."

The anger is intensified because it comes on the heels of hard-fought hope and optimism, Rigamer said. In recent months, the physical signs of rebuilding were coming into focus in many parts of the metro area. The Army Corps of Engineers was fixing the substandard levees that turned Katrina into the nation's worst-ever disaster, schools were improving, corrupt politicians were being indicted in droves and even racial tensions seemed to be easing. On the coast, fishers prepared for a bumper crop after the down years after Katrina.

"Everyone's angry at BP," Rigamer said. "Then you add the duplicity, the double talk, the foot-dragging and it compounds the feelings of anger."

The full effect of the oil spill on the environment and the economy is unknown. It's hard to get a clear accounting of the oil's impact on the Gulf when experts are fighting about how much broken-down petroleum and dispersed toxins are under the water's surface, possibly waiting to wreak havoc at a later date. It's hard to separate the true impacts from the perceived ones when shrimpers are passing up the opening day of white shrimp season to do cleanup work and restaurants aren't buying the day's catch because their patrons, with no scientific basis, are afraid of eating Gulf seafood.

View full sizeDinah Rogers, The Times-Picayune archiveSt. Bernard shrimper and net-maker Charles Robin III was photographed demonstrating net repair at his home in violet in April.

"With the oil spill, it's the not-knowing deal," St. Bernard shrimper and net-maker Charles Robin III told The Times-Picayune. "I was born and raised in Yscloskey. We dealt with hurricanes all our lives. It busts your stuff up, you lick your wounds and go back to living again. But with this oil spill, we don't know what we're dealing with. We're worried this oil is gonna come in and ruin us, and it's affecting us emotionally."

Robin had yet another setback when he was using his trawler for BP spill cleanup work and cut off his finger in an accident. He said that was the final blow. He's going to a therapist for the first time in his life, and the doctor was bowled over to learn about all the traumas he'd endured in silence over the past five years. The fury had built up inside him by the time former BP chief executive Tony Hayward made his infamous gaffe, telling a news reporter that he wanted his life back.

"If that sumbitch Hayward came to me, I'd probably kill him and throw him overboard and feed him to the crabs," Robin said. "It just burns me up."

But anger at BP may have also artificially diminished Katrina's true impact in the minds of people like Robin.

"The reality is that after Katrina, every fishing village east of the river was devastated -- Yscloskey, Hopedale, Delacroix," said Mark Schexnayder, a biologist and fisheries expert. "There were no docks, very few boats got into safe harbor. There was decimation of the infrastructure in all the fishing communities, the boats, the nets, fishermen's houses, there was no electricity. None of that was harmed in this" oil spill.

Schexnayder believes the misperception that oil is fouling everything in south Louisiana could prove more harmful in the long run than temporary fishing closures. He said some fishers seem to have forgotten that they fought the same perception problem after Katrina, when media reports about a "toxic soup" from the floodwaters scared seafood consumers.

These are some of the complexities that make blanket comparisons between Katrina and BP's spill dangerous.

Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University, said that in very important ways, the two events are polar opposites. Katrina destroyed coastal infrastructure, but not the fisheries and energy resources, he said. By contrast, the oil spill took out the fish and the oil exploration work, but hasn't coated a single house, road, boat or store.

In metro New Orleans, the picture is slightly different, but the end result could be the same, Campanella said. Katrina ravaged everything, both the infrastructure and the resources. This time, only a segment of the city's resources -- tourism, seafood and oil and gas businesses, along with the community's offshore and seaside recreation options -- seem to be affected, but there's an underlying sense that those are critical to New Orleans' health and survival.

It also remains to be seen whether the procedural tangles that made Katrina's aftermath so tortuous for so many also end up drawing out the pain of the spill. Walter Leger, an architect of the Road Home who is now an attorney for businesses with claims against the oil company, insists that the state at least tried to pay everyone as much as possible after Katrina. He's skeptical that BP, or even independent claims administrator Ken Feinberg, will have the same motivation.

On the other hand, the civil justice system Leger holds up as the fairest way to fully compensate the spill's victims is the same court process that took 20 years to settle similar claims by Alaska fishers and others affected by the Exxon Valdez tanker accident in 1989.

Ultimately, the relative long-term impact of Katrina and the BP disaster will come down to this: Will the oil spill actually drive people, cultural assets and businesses away for good, the way Katrina did?

"I already heard from a couple of people with infants who decided to pull out, move away because of the spill. At least that's the cited reason," Campanella said. "But ... if someone's struggled this hard to come back after Katrina and reinvest in the local society here, I do not see this forcing them to reconsider that decision."